Buzzsaw Sports Guy: A satirical look at sports
Fans know her simply as Katie Collins, a quarterback for the Los Angeles Swoon. But upon a more in-depth examination, we find a woman who has persevered through endless adversity and achieved her dream of playing professional lingerie football, a dream she’d had ever since being a little girl.
“I remember tossing the old pigskin around with Katie in the backyard every weekend,” her father, Mike Collins says. “I think it was when she was six when she said she wanted to play pro football dressed in lingerie some day. I was a bit disturbed and confused. When I told her there was no such thing as the Lingerie Football League yet, she got really upset and ran to her room crying.”
Katie stuck with her dreams, however, keeping relative pace with the boys in her neighborhood who played football occasionally. Despite being a girl, her mother, Molly, says she always exhibited “stunningly mediocre play, which I guess is pretty good for a girl in an all boys group. She was consistently picked before the fat kids.”
Molly says the most difficult part about Katie’s hobby wasn’t taking care of all the cuts and bruises she sustained in most of the games, it was forcing her to wear more clothing whenever she went outside to play.
“She would insist on wearing a bikini out to play with the boys, even when she was nine years old and it was freezing outside,” Molly says. “It took all of my best efforts just to make her wear sweatpants and a coat.”
While other girls her age pursued a number of other ambitions and interests, Katie’s parents insist their daughter was just different, focused on something no other girl could relate to or understand. They admit that even for them, it was hard to come to support Katie’s only dream, one that she talked about endlessly.
“One day, completely exasperated, I told her that the only way she might ever achieve her dream was if men found a new way to exploit women by demeaning the sport they play by making them wear something revealing and degrading,” Molly says.
Her mother’s inspiring words came true in 2004, when Mitch Mortaza organized the first Lingerie Bowl and aired it as a pay-per-view program during halftime at Super Bowl XXXVIII. Just 17 years old at the time, Lauren took the game as a sign that a full market for a lingerie football league might open up in the coming years. Now an older woman without so many parental restrictions, she ramped up her pickup game participation, playing in full lingerie with as many groups of random guys she could find on the weekends. Reportedly, the men were always confused by her outfit choices and surprised by her acceptable play.
After she finished high school, Katie moved on to SUNY-Purchase and continued to pursue her dream, despite the college’s lack of a legitimate lingerie football program.
At last, just after finishing college, Katie got her break when open tryouts were held for the Swoon in preparation for the Lingerie Football League’s inaugural season in 2009.
“This whole thing has been like a dream come true for me,” Katie says. “After all the doubts my parents had of a league like this ever existing, it makes it that much more gratifying for me to be here, doing what I’ve always wanted to do. I mean, at least football-wise it’s what I’ve always wanted. Our uniforms are really more like bikinis than full-blown lingerie, but hey, nothing is perfect, right?”